Consumer Innovation

As retailers look to drive profitable growth through loyalty and differentiation, innovation usually plays a prominent role. Innovation can take many different forms, such as product, customer experience, business model, service and process innovation. However, becoming innovative is not easy. Innovative retailers are those that excel at solving high-priority problems for their target customer and help meet unmet customer needs – often ...

Does every innovation need new technology, or a new manufacturing process, or a new patent? Does it need to be new for the sake of it? Not if you understand exactly what you have before you start, and how it can be exploited further to meet new demands in the marketplace.

Innovation is the driving force of progress, which is a vital element of business development. To put it simpler, if you want your business to grow, you must incorporate innovation into it. This does not mean that you should update your equipment and learn new techniques only. You also need to apply innovation in product development, and there are no ...

Question: We’re a very large, well-known consumer products company, and our portfolio is actually quite complex, as we have many different types of initiatives included, all at vastly different stages. In fact, we often debate whether certain projects should be included at all. Do you have any leading practices related to defining what should be included, what should be left ...

The more innovation, the better. That seems to be the going mantra. After all, who wouldn’t want to come up with something new? You can gain additional share of existing markets, or even create new ones. But there comes a tipping point. One where more innovation doesn’t help a business. It hurts it. When improperly paced (i.e., pacing too many ...

Steve Jobs was a genius. He transformed his industry through innovation, making the right call at the right time for the right technology in the right product. Famously, he avoided asking customers what they wanted, because they wouldn’t understand it and it would waste time. Steve Jobs was rare. There are very few situations where normal companies can take the ...

When you have come up with great ideas the question is how to make them reality. In practice, I have learned that if they don’t fit your organizational goals, your idea will be rejected and nothing will materialize in the end. It is essential to check this fit as early as possible in your innovation journey. Fending off ‘No’ The ...

Each year businesses spend an aggregate of $40B on market research. This is largely in an effort to mine new insights about customers’ unmet needs, or to test out new ideas to see if a large enough segment of their customers (or of the general population) will react positively to them. Businesses have begun to realize however that rather than – ...

The idea of an IoT future is both exciting and terrifying. Unfortunately, for every wonderful idea made plausible by the IoT, there are still core issues that need to be worked out. With consequences ranging from annoying to potentially deadly, it’s hard to weigh the potential benefits made plausible and possible by innovation in the IoT against the dangers that the same systems will inherently expose us to. Nevertheless, we must look ahead and realize that even if the IoT is-coming-no-matter-what, there is no similar promise that follows in terms of security and disaster mitigation--at least not yet.